Media monitoring watches where your brand is written about on the internet. You enter a phrase, typically a company, product or destination name, and gas then continuously goes through news and industry websites. As soon as the phrase appears in an article, it saves it as a mention: a link to the article, a snippet of text with the phrase highlighted and the time of publication. So you do not have to visit news sites yourself and check whether somebody wrote about you.
Before you start
Media monitoring is not part of any plan. It is a separate subscription add-on (the application calls it an addon) that we add to the customer account for you. Until the customer account has it, the Media monitoring section is not visible in the left menu at all.
- To have it activated, write through the contact form or contact your consultant. We will then add the add-on to your customer account.
- You can verify the activation in Settings → Customer account → Subscription. A Media monitoring tag will appear in the Active addons part and there will be a green mark next to the Media monitoring item in the Advanced features part.
- Reload the application. The Media monitoring item appears in the left menu with three pages under it: Overview, Phrase list and Media overview.
The add-on also determines how many phrases you can track at the same time. In its basic form it adds six of them. The limits overview on the same subscription page, at the Max. media monitorings item, shows how many slots your customer account has and how many of them are taken.
Anyone with access to the customer account can view the monitoring and mentions, that is the Administrator, User and Viewer roles. Only Administrator and User can create, copy and delete tracked phrases. A Viewer will not see the buttons for these actions.
Tracked phrases always belong to one customer account. When you switch to a different customer account at the top, you will see its own phrases and its own mentions.
What the monitoring watches and how often
gas goes through more than fifty online media, mostly Czech ones. Among them are nationwide news sites, websites of public service media, regional sites and several industry and tourism websites. You will find the complete and current list on the Media overview page, with a link to each medium's website.
New articles are found and downloaded continuously throughout the day, roughly every few minutes. Tracked phrases are recalculated just as often, so a new mention usually appears in the application within a few minutes of the moment gas downloads the article. The Last recalculation value on the phrase detail shows when your phrase was last processed.
Articles published at most three years back are included in the processing. gas no longer looks for older texts.
The monitoring will not catch absolutely everything. It works only with publicly available article texts on the tracked websites. It does not track social networks (you will find posts on Facebook, Instagram and other networks in other sections of the gas application), printed editions of newspapers and magazines, radio and television broadcasts themselves, discussions under articles, or websites that are not on the list of tracked media. gas does not read content accessible only after logging in or after paying a subscription: for articles locked for subscribers it usually knows only the headline and the opening paragraph, so it cannot search for the phrase in the rest of the text.
How to start your first tracked phrase
- In the left menu click Media monitoring and then Phrase list.
- Above the table on the right click Create monitoring. The New monitoring window opens.
- Fill in the Monitoring name field (the phrase is shown under this name in lists and in emails), Search phrase, Measure from date and Measure until date.
- Optionally you can add Exclude phrases (articles containing them will not get among the mentions), tick Search by word root and select a campaign in the Assign to campaign field.
- Submit the form with the Create monitoring button. The new phrase appears in the Phrase list table right away.
- Click its name to open the phrase detail. With the Add email address button you can have summaries of new mentions sent to you by email.
How to word a phrase so that it catches as few unrelated articles as possible, and how to edit, copy and delete phrases later, is described in the article Managing tracked phrases.
What happens next
The phrase starts to be evaluated at the next recalculation, usually within a few minutes. Each time, gas goes through the whole period you entered, not just today, so older articles will also fall among the mentions if they are in the archive and were published within the Measure from date and Measure until date range.
You will see the mentions found in three places: on the detail of the specific phrase, in the mentions table on the Overview page (there the mentions from all your phrases are together) and as counts in the columns of the Phrase list table.
If you entered an email address for the phrase, an invitation with the subject "Invitation to media monitoring" is sent to it first. Until the recipient confirms the subscription with the button in this email, no summaries are sent to them. On the phrase detail you can tell the status from the tag with the address: an unconfirmed address is grey, a confirmed one is coloured. After confirmation, a summary with the subject "gas: new media mentions" arrives at most once a day and only when new mentions have been added since the last time. One email contains at most twenty mentions per phrase, you will find the rest in the application via the Go to measurement detail button.
What the individual pages of the section show
Overview
A dashboard for the whole monitoring for the period selected at the top of the page. At the top are the Publisher mentions and Article mentions graphs, and you can add, switch and remove tiles. Below them is a table with all mentions from all your phrases: the Monitoring column says which phrase the mention belongs to, the URL address column leads to the original article, Snippet shows a piece of text with the phrase highlighted and Article publication time says when the article was published.
Phrase list
An overview of all tracked phrases of the customer account. For each one you can see Phrase, Excluded phrases, the By root flag, the Mentions, Article mentions and Publisher mentions counts and the measurement period in the From and To columns. This is where new phrases are created, copied and deleted.
Media overview
A list of the media that gas tracks. The Name column is the name of the medium, URL address leads to its website, Total articles and Articles in 24 hours show how many articles from this website gas has processed. With the Request to add a source button you can suggest a medium that is missing from the list. We assess each request manually, and when we approve it we add the medium to the list.
Tracked phrase detail
A card with the phrase settings (Name, Phrase, Excluded phrases, Start date, End date, Measurement duration, Last recalculation and Email subscriptions), two tiles with the Article mentions and Publisher mentions counts and, below them, a table of all mentions of this phrase. This is also where email subscriptions are managed and where you can create a copy of the phrase.
Everything the mention tables can do, how to filter in them and how to hide an unsuitable mention is described in the article Overview of mentions and media.
Common problems
I do not see Media monitoring in the left menu
Either the customer account does not have the add-on activated, or you are switched to a different customer account than the one where you have the monitoring. Check Settings → Customer account → Subscription, the Active addons part. If the Media monitoring tag is missing there, write to us through the contact form.
I do not see the Create monitoring button or it is unavailable
Either you have the Viewer role in the customer account, which may only view data, or you have used up your number of phrases. In that case a notice appears above the table saying that you have used up all media monitorings. Delete a phrase you no longer need, or write through the contact form to ask for an increase.
The phrase has no mentions
Most often the phrase is too long or too specific. gas searches for the entered phrase as a continuous piece of text, so "Turistická centrála Podlesí" will not find an article that only says "centrála Podlesí". Try a shorter and unambiguous variant. For names that are declined in Czech, ticking the Search by word root option helps: the phrase will then be found in another grammatical case as well. Also check the Exclude phrases field, it may filter out more than you expected, and verify that the Measure from date and Measure until date period matches the time when the articles were published. It also plays a role that the article may have been published in a medium that is not on the list of tracked media.
The phrase says Last recalculation: Never
The phrase has not been evaluated yet. The recalculation runs continuously, wait a few minutes and reload the page. If the value does not change even after an hour, write to us through the contact form.
I saw a mention in print, on the radio or on a social network, but it is not in gas
The monitoring works only with article texts on the tracked websites. It does not go through printed editions, broadcasts or social networks. If the medium published the same news on its website as well, the mention will appear; otherwise it will not.
The whole article is accessible only to subscribers
For locked articles gas usually has only the headline and the opening paragraph available. When your phrase is in the paid part of the text, the monitoring will not find it. Nothing can be done about this, it is a limitation on the side of the given medium.
The phrase disappeared from the Phrase list
The table shows only those phrases whose measurement period falls within the period selected at the top of the page. Extend the selected period, for example to the last year, and the phrase will appear in the table again.
The monitoring has ended and no new mentions are being added
Only phrases whose measurement period includes today are evaluated. Once the date in the Measure until date field has passed, the phrase is no longer recalculated. If you want to continue tracking, open the phrase detail and use the Create copy button to create a new one with the same settings and a new period.
The Mentions and Article mentions numbers differ for one phrase
They are not synonyms. Mentions counts all occurrences found, including those you have hidden and including reprinted copies of the same article. Article mentions and Publisher mentions count only those occurrences that you have not hidden and that are not marked as copies.
The same news item is in the list several times
A news agency report is often picked up by several media and each publishes it under its own address. For gas these are different articles, so you will see them as separate mentions. gas recognises as a copy only a repetition of the same headline within one medium. You can hide unwanted rows in the mentions table.
Emails with new mentions are not arriving
The most common cause is an unconfirmed subscription. The recipient has to click the button in the invitation they received by email; until they do, we do not send them any summaries. On the phrase detail, the Confirmation date is missing for an unconfirmed address. The invitation can be sent again, but a quarter of an hour must pass between two sendings. Also check the junk mail folder. And bear in mind that a summary is sent at most once a day and only when new mentions have really been added.
The email contains only some of the mentions
At most twenty mentions per phrase fit into one email. The rest is always in the application, you can get to it with the Go to measurement detail button directly from the email.
We want to stop receiving summaries at a certain address
Open the phrase detail and click the envelope button next to the Email subscriptions field. The Manage email addresses window opens, where you use the Unsubscribe action for the relevant address. The address stops receiving summaries immediately and it does not affect the tracking of the phrase in the application in any way.
Our medium (or our client's medium) is missing from the list
On the Media overview page click Request to add a source, fill in the website address and submit the request. You will receive a confirmation that the request has been sent. We assess additions manually, it is not automatic, and not every website can be tracked technically.
I deleted a phrase by mistake
Deleting a phrase is irreversible and all its mentions found and email subscriptions disappear along with it. The phrase has to be created again; the mentions will then be recalculated from the article archive for the period you enter for it.